Gender of Nouns

All Italian nouns have either a masculine or a feminine gender. Gender is a purely grammatical term. Nouns referring to human beings or animals sometimes have the same grammatical gender as their natural gender, but not always (see below).

Italian native speakers rarely find this a problem. However speakers of other languages often find it difficult to remember the gender of nouns and this creates a problem when it comes to making the other components of the noun group ‘agree’ with the noun.

With non-animate objects, there is not always an obvious explanation for their gender. Why, for example, should sera ‘evening’ be feminine, while giorno ‘day’ is masculine? Non-Italian speakers either have to learn and memorise the genders of words or consult a dictionary. Italian dictionaries usually indicate the gender of nouns with abbreviations such as s.m. (sostantivo maschile) and s.f. (sostantivofemminile).

Generally, singular nouns ending in -o are masculine while nouns ending in -a are feminine. There are a number of exceptions, like il poeta(the poet), being masculine, or la mano(the hand) but you can stick to the rule above when in doubt.